Making Paper Airplanes and a Free Plane to Try

I have boys, so as you can imagine, I’m pretty good at making a basic paper airplane. It’s a necessary skill when you have boys, allowing you to transform any scrap of paper into a quick, easy and free toy. I’ve entertained my kids on numerous occasions with this skill, sometimes by folding an old grocery list from the depths of my purse.

Then there are the experts.

I recently had a chance to review* a book called “Making Paper Airplanes” by David Woodroffe. The book is chock full of paper airplanes–180 by the page count. Each plane is printed in full color on sturdy paper with directions on the opposite page.

The instructions are fairly easy to follow if you’ve done a little folding. After a couple planes you’ll be an expert too. It helps that the first chapter is all about folding planes and getting them to fly.

If you get the book, I highly recommend scanning the pages and folding your copy. Folding up the pages of the book destroys not just the original blueprint, but the directions for the next plane too. (Directions are printed on the back of the previous plane.)

The author does suggest that if you want to use the book’s pages you start from the back and work your way forward in sequence.

We made a couple planes from scans. The plus of this technique is that my junior artist got to color his own plane. Some of the designs are too dark for that to work. Oh, and don’t even think of doing this without a drawing to follow–unless you’re a master origami maker, you’ll want the fold and cut lines from the designs!

You can pick up Making Paper Airplanes at your local Barnes & Noble or at Amazon.com. It’s $8 bucks at B&N right now…which is about 4.4 cents a plane.

Check out the slide show below to see some of the designs you can make. And ignore my basement carpet in the background.

Now, since I promised to bring you a free thing for your kids to do everyday, here’s a link for a free paper airplane design, with instructions and a video. This will make a F-16 Falcon.

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